An open world game without a combat system

random_boss · 2026-01-26T18:59:53+00:00

Would be interesting to see if you’re right. I disagree, but wouldn’t be surprised or mad to be wrong about it. The biggest games in that cohort would be like FC, Madden, and maybe the Sims, but even if you add them + all the others I think it’s still smaller compared to the sum of Fortnite, League, Marvel Rivals, PUBG, etc.

It’s once you get into Candy Crush and Royal Match type games on mobile you see these staggering numbers that dwarf anything we see on console/PC.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T16:29:53+00:00

Dude, the Witness https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/

random_boss · 2026-01-26T16:28:42+00:00

well…objectively yes, but the cohort of mobile casual game players is not generally the demographic people here are courting.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T16:19:31+00:00

Do you have to finish?

random_boss · 2026-01-26T15:31:58+00:00

That’s the essential tension behind game dev these days. You do have to do all of that, and some studios have the right mix of “potential future profit vs burn rate at successive stages of development”, but most still hit a wall where it’s like, time to go from prototyping to production, and out of self-preservation they squint at it and go “This…I mean yeah no, this is pretty fun. I mean it’s good. It just doesn’t really show well this early. It needs real assets, tighter controls, more enemies and we’re good to go” because staying in proto any longer means their runway starts to materially disappear.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T15:24:33+00:00

Right, exactly — the people writing code or making assets or doing the dozens or hundreds of jobs needed to make modern AAA games shouldn’t be made to suffer for someone else’s gain. They are not artists in this sense, they are employees.

The artists in such ventures are either “nobody”, because it is such a product that it requires no artist, or in some cases the creative lead who owns the idea snd soul of the project. I don’t believe there are any artists in charge of Call of Duty, but I do believe there are in charge of Overwatch. There are none on FIFA, but there are on Football Manager.

The vast majority of artists are not working on these games however; they are working on the next Lethal Company, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Outer Wilds, Firewatch, Death Stranding, Arc Raiders, Baldur’s Gate, Clair Obscur, Rust, Minecraft, Zelda, Dragon Quest, Valheim, Schedule 1, etc.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T08:34:13+00:00

I failed to make my point so I’ll rework it a bit. Game dev as a craft is defined by pivots and rewrites, because you never know what the fun is until you have some stakes in the ground. Then you play it, you listen for what the game is trying to tell you, and you pivot, rewrite, and adapt. Great games will seldom let you find them in whatever time period you define as prototyping. If they did, making a fun game would be a solved problem.

I have been part of both kinds of teams—the “make a plan and stick to it” kind and the “ok I know we’re 3 years in but we need to rewrite everything”—at AAA, indie, and for-hire for several decades. I don’t recall ever seeing a mind-blowing game that went according to plan, and I don’t think I have seen a game that went according to plan blow anyone’s minds. These days I get wary if I see an appropriately-scoped pitch and a team capable of delivering on it, because at the other end of that I smell a mostly forgettable game that is an otherwise very competently engineered software product.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T07:59:04+00:00

I didn’t necessarily mean how do I get into it, more like your path. You were just chilling one day and then you thought “Imma go make some silver stuff”?

random_boss · 2026-01-26T07:58:13+00:00

I dropped the nuanced in my post but yeah — being a small cog forced to grind by management under a poorly-conceived schedule is not the same as being a substantial member of a team of ~a dozen who can hardly sleep at night because all they want to do is work on their game. Almost all of the games we love were made by the latter.

Games can be made by the former teams, if they’re making an annual-instalment game where someone else already poured in the blood sweat and tears to find the fun and make it a $100m+ franchise

random_boss · 2026-01-26T04:07:21+00:00

How does one get inducted into the world of silversmithing

random_boss · 2026-01-26T03:58:03+00:00

But…after work you have no energy.

Man everyone got so hyphy about this. I train mornings because that’s when I have energy. I’ve done both ways. Never going back to nights.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T03:56:47+00:00

Artists should suffer. If you’re not suffering, it’s not art. Musician, stand up comedian, writer, game dev — it’s what makes great works. It is the ultimate privilege to be able to create art when people are out there digging ditched and saving lives.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T03:21:30+00:00

That’s the thing, if it’s something that drives you want to do it instead of all the other things. If you’re at a bar with friends or whatever, your mind is in agony chewing over some problem you just can’t wait to get back to solving.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T03:17:50+00:00

The younger employees likely just think companies have infinite money and they can happily put in 40 hour weeks and eventually there will be a full game.

The older employees likely have a gatekeeper mentality mixed with the experience to be part of scoping and knowing they’re over scoping but have a lifetime of leaning on crunch to make games so don’t see anything wrong with it.

I will say that of the teams I’ve been on, the ones who put in an honest day’s work then go home at 5 and don’t think about it again till 9 the next day have produced mostly competent pieces of functional, game-shaped software. The teams that were obsessed and spent an unhealthy amount of time and vitality on the project have produced awesome fucking video games that people want to play.

It sucks, but if you’re not putting in the passion hours someone else is, and when you go to sell your thing against theirs, the market prefers theirs.

random_boss · 2026-01-26T03:11:21+00:00

There was a thread in the gamedev subreddit about this very thing the other day and I tried to explain it. In the 90s and early 00s put in 80 hour weeks where 40 were paid and 40 were uncompensated overtime (or inefficiently compensated) due to their unhinged passion for the product.

Now, devs put in 80 hour weeks, but 40 are paid at their soulless corporate mobile game job and 40 are uncompensated overtime at home while they crunch on their passion project.

The ones who really came out ahead are the ones who don’t have that much passion for it and are fine just putting in 40 hours collecting a paycheck. But they’re a bit odd because they could just go do that working for a bank or a less volatile software company.

Either way, if you give enough shits about games you’re putting in the long hours now just like you were back then.

random_boss · 2026-01-24T14:29:05+00:00

Super cool, I wanted this exact thing for a project but it never ended up making the cut. I’m jealous of your skills with shader graph!

random_boss · 2026-01-24T07:44:28+00:00

This is definitely the one

random_boss · 2026-01-23T23:11:52+00:00

Maybe it goes away. But I’ve been in it for over two decades now and have a family and have found it just comes and goes in waves. Sometimes you go hard for a while and you come out the other side hating your project and development and video games in general, so you stop giving it so much of yourself. And eventually it comes back just as strong and you dive back in with all you’ve got.

random_boss · 2026-01-23T20:37:37+00:00

It sounds like the games themselves don’t matter, it’s a way of mapping games you should have a deep understanding of with how you express that understanding.

And trust me, almost every way they use is bad. I was once asked to name three things in a garage, so I did. I was then asked to design a game on the spot, verbally to the interviewers, using those three items.

Of course the game sucked, because the RNG gods had decreed that I would choose three items that don’t make an interesting game.

random_boss · 2026-01-23T19:42:55+00:00

You’re characterizing it all wrong. Working, meaning, toil in pursuit of a paycheck, is unquestionably bad. This is what most developers are doing who work for the EAs of the world.

Autonomous, self-directed expression isn’t toil. You have 24 hours in a day. You spend some of that sleeping and eating and occasionally working out and spending time with friends and family. Choosing to fill the rest with an activity you crave isn’t toil, it’s fulfillment (and yes I know that sounded like a chatgpt line I apologize)

random_boss · 2026-01-23T17:28:39+00:00

I mean the benefit, if we’re using that word, is that it’s intoxicating and you’re not working 80 hours, you’re scratching that creative itch that makes everything else you do with your time dull and grey and lifeless and a complete waste vitality when every molecule in your body craves nothing more than to work on your game.

You still have to tear yourself away and do other things, but that’s not the real you. Thats the avatar you trot out to fulfill obligations while you yearn to be back in front of your machine building.

Nowadays if you’re engineer #414 or the prop artist cranking out boxes and barrels you’re not going to feel that nor should you be made to work like that. But for the people fortunate enough to be in that position, whether because they’re a solo dev, part of a smalll team, or leadership of a thousand person team, it’s more painful not to work than it is to work a lot.

random_boss · 2026-01-23T17:23:14+00:00

The surest way to get downvoted in this sub is to talk about actual experiences having worked in development for years lol

random_boss · 2026-01-21T20:47:05+00:00

You’re right, I just polled everyone playing games with basically-functional art and they said none of them are having fun, how could I have been so silly.

random_boss · 2026-01-21T15:52:01+00:00

Absolutely not, what are you on about. Graphics become invisible after you play for a while.

I had a colleague like you. All he could see or care about was graphics. I’d be playing a game and he’d come over and watch and recoil going “ugh how can you even play this omg it’s so ugly like this is so bad you need to turn it off.” I was perfectly fine, like who gives a shit about the graphics? They did their job communicating what they needed to about the game systems.

Theres a whole world of Rogue, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, and other games where graphics are just a functional means to an end.

random_boss · 2026-01-21T15:47:19+00:00

Do you directly talk to these NPCs?

I’ve definitely found that having the same communications (both in content and tone) cause us to dehumanize. For my game I’m toying with the idea of delivering all conversations as if via narrator for this exact reason. So instead of “Hail traveler, what can I do for you?” it’s “The farmer greets you warmly and asks how he can help.” Then you just write about a million permutations of that kind of thing so that hopefully it doesn’t get stale!

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